


Accidents Happen

by flecksofpoppy



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-30
Updated: 2016-12-30
Packaged: 2018-09-13 09:15:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9116935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flecksofpoppy/pseuds/flecksofpoppy
Summary: Rufus Shinra, even diseased and in exile, makes shaping men seem like a hobby.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [its_pronounced_wiener_slave](https://archiveofourown.org/users/its_pronounced_wiener_slave/gifts).



> Just a little ditty that I hope brightens your day, Heich! <3 Happy birthday!

Cloud Strife’s life, much like his last name, seems to be a series of accidents—both good and bad—but always efficient in moving him from one place to another. 

If there’s one thing Cloud knows, though, it’s the reality of wounds, accidents, both as victim as well as victor, of circumstance.

In some ridiculous way, these experiences can be demarcated by orgasms; it’s how Cloud starts to register that he’s actually alive.

The first accident is saving Tifa, and then falling asleep for four years before watching his best friend die. Zack’s body in the brown earth full of bullets and blood gives Cloud an inhuman strength to leave the site, enter Midgar, force the unfamiliar buster sword up over his shoulder and assert himself as the man he (now) knows himself to be.

He jerks off as a mercenary, as a man full of ambition and purpose, a self-assured loner who knows his goals despite an uncertain world.

Tifa seems like a ghost, and when she asks him how he slept, he’s not sure how to answer. He’s no longer sure who he is.

*

The second accident is a green river run of memories, toxic and treacherous nightmares, but he finds a hand somewhere in the current—Tifa, a literal buoy in a lake of madness—and he holds tight.

Everything is a memory and the present all at once. It makes him sick, but it also makes him remember, and at some point, he’s able to let go of her hand.

Later, on the airship, he jerks off as the distraction of a man fighting air sickness. The inability to keep a steady stomach is an old, ingrained shame; yet, but also as a whole person who enjoys an orgasm the way he always pictured it in his youth, he realizes that this is not what he’s _supposed_ to do, but what he wants to do. 

He realizes that orgasms feel good for him as a whole person, and not as an act.

He moans this time, quietly, as he comes into his own fist, lost in the counter-clickhiss of airship gears; and this is how he knows he is not a cog or machine.

He does not huff the same way that steam does through a mako pipe; he is not mechanized.

*

The third accident isn’t a revelation, but a kiss in a bar in Edge.

Tifa’s lips find his, and they kiss; then, they both draw back, staring at each other in shock. Whether it’s the few celebratory shots they took after Bahamut Sin’s defeat or simple inevitable attraction, he doesn’t know, but it happened.

She laughs first, shaking her head, girlish and embarrassed; and then he laughs, too, a rare sound from his throat. He shakes his head.

He loves her; he will always love her.

“That was weird,” she murmurs, touching her lips, but looking at him with confusion in her light brown eyes.

“It was weird,” he agrees, touching his own lips. “I…”

“Let’s not do it again,” she says softly, cocking her head to the side, but she does reach up to brush several strands out of Cloud’s face. “Not quite right.”

He nods a little, feeling stupidly childish as he allows Tifa to stroke his hair.

“Go upstairs and say good night to Denzel?” she asks, leaning forward to kiss his cheek.

“Yeah,” he grunts, but before walking away, he reaches out to brush the hair out of her face as well, smiling ever so slightly.

“Flirt,” she says, rolling her eyes, and now they’re warm.

And that feels okay, just like that.

*

There are no accidents after the world nearly ends twice, and Cloud saves it, even though he was never _designed_ to do anything spectacular, never formed or shaped like Sephiroth or Zack was.

Rufus Shinra, even diseased and in exile, makes shaping men seem like a hobby. It’s as if he’s spinning a top and watching the dirt turn patterns, smiling absently in the afternoon sun like a child’s game.

But it’s no child’s game when he receives Cloud after the healing rain and asks whether his dark marks have faded.

Cloud answers without words by offering his pale, unblemished arm out for inspection, head cocking to the side in a display of consternation that his former self would not have thought possible.

It says: _fuck you_. It says: _I am not a clone._ It says: _this is a choice._

“Fighting is a choice,” Rufus says, pulling his own sleeve up to match Cloud’s arm. “You fought well.”

Cloud snorts, tugging his own sleeve down. “You took that choice from many people years ago, before your city and body were ruined.”

Rufus snorts in return, pulling down his own sleeve; Cloud resolves to leave immediately. He hesitates, though, when he thinks of the conversation he can expect back home.

Lovely things: how the rain feels on healthy skin, how clean everything is, how fresh mud smells without pollution, how the future looks as bright as the rim of the sky when the cleansing storm starts to clear.

Cloud doesn’t want to look at new, ripe horizons; so he stays, and instead talks into the night with an old nemesis about old accidents.

And somehow, in that arc of memory that is no longer confusing, he finds himself in an orgasm where there are no lies.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a [tumblr](http://flecksofpoppy.tumblr.com/). c:


End file.
